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Part of the Festival’s mission is to promote the vibrancy and bright future of chamber music, and this is reflected in our commitment to promoting and producing new music. During the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, we devote a long weekend to focus on the music of living composers performed by faculty and our fellowship students.
CHEN YI (b. 1953)
Feng
Chi Ting, flute • Nathaniel Wolff, oboe • Ju Young Yi, clarinet • Daniel McCarty, bassoon • Jean Marie Smith, horn
JEFFREY MUMFORD (b. 1955)
Three Short Duos
Russell Iceberg, violin • Jane Yoo, harp
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL (b. 1982)
Kalief
Derek Bermel, clarinet • Derek Hartman, piano
DAVID SANFORD (b. 1963)
The Silent Hearth
Lyndon Ji, piano • Yuan Zhou, piano
DAI FUJIKURA (b. 1977)
Aquarius
Daniel Dastoor, violin • Kayla Bryan, violin • Wanshu Suzie Qiu, viola • Camden Archambeau, cello
MARTIN BRESNICK (b. 1946)
***
Ju Young Yi, clarinet • Natalie Brennecke, viola • Derek Hartman, piano
GEORGE CRUMB (1929–2022)
Dream Sequence (Images II)
Russell Iceberg, violin • Bennet Huang cello • Yuan Zhou, piano • Alexa Clawson, percussion
PROGRAM NOTES
CHEN YI
Feng (1998)
Feng was commissioned by the San Francisco Citywinds with a Chamber Music America commissioning award. The world premiere was on January 13, 1999 at St John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, followed by a New York premiere on January 17. The character “feng” in Chinese means “wind” or “the winds,” and also “view, folk songs, style, and manner.” I used the five standard Western wind instruments to sound the Eastern feeling of the winds in the quintet Feng.
JEFFREY MUMFORD
three short duos for violin & harp (2011)
Commissioned by a consortium of individuals consisting of Philip Berlin, Pamela Johnson, Eve Sandberg, and Mika Hornyak, my three short duos for violin & harp were written for Kelly Hall-Tompkins and Bridget Kibbey respectively.
In writing these short pieces, I wanted to explore the sonic personalities of the two instruments, particularly the relationships between the prevailingly diatonic nature of the harp and the chromatic and varied articulative possibilities of the violin.
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL
Kalief (2021)
Kalief is a short piece inspired by the tragic story of Kalief Browder. Browder was an African-American male and 16 years old when he was sent to Rikers Island, on a charge of stealing a backpack. Browder spent more than 1000 days there awaiting trial — including 700 days in solitary confinement — because he refused to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. After prosecutors finally dropped the charge in 2013, Browder earned his GED and began attending community college. But in 2015, after three psychiatric hospitalizations and two previous suicide attempts, he hanged himself.
In January 2021, there was an insurgence at The United States Capitol Building, primarily consisting of angry, white Americans. A young woman named Riley Williams was accused of participating in the theft of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Capitol attack. She was arrested, but shortly released and allowed to stay with her mother, with an ankle bracelet, and could leave for work and some other court-approved reasons.
There is a clear imbalance between these two cases.
It is important to note the case of Riley Williams to argue that there are two justice systems in the United States: one for poor, BIPOC people, and another for more monied and white people.
Commissioned by the Willinger Duo and premiered in March 2021.
DAVID SANFORD
The Silent Hearth (2018)
The Silent Hearth (2018) is a composition for piano four hands which was commissioned by, and dedicated to, the composer’s former colleague at Mount Holyoke College Gary Steigerwalt and his wife Dana Muller who performed the piece’s premier. The work depicts the dilapidated 1896 Steinert Concert Hall that sits some 40 feet below the sidewalks of Boylston Street in Boston and closed in 1942, but is still occasionally used for (piano) recordings. Muller and Steigerwalt recorded their album of Schubert’s Complete Works for Piano Four Hands, there in 1995, and Schubert’s “Overture to Fierrabras” (D. 798) forms the harmonic and melodic foundation of the piece.
DAI FUJIKURA
Aquarius (2020)
I always thought of a group of string instruments as more than just a collection of solo string instruments. When they play together, the sound becomes another completely different living organism, like another instrument.
The sound of a group of strings — including the string quartet — has an elasticity. In my opinion it is the only combination that continually allows you to form one shape into another, in a sort of shape-shifting sort of way.
And it is not only the shape. While listening to such sound, I start to imagine what it is like to touch, squeeze, or eat the sound. Is it hard on the outside but soft on the inside, or the other way around? How does it taste?
I wanted to construct a piece which freely changes form without any gaps or having a discernible feeling of sections. Before you realize it, the string quartet is making a sound quite different to what it was playing a moment ago.
Since I imagined a sort of floating, liquid form, I thought Aquarius was the perfect title. Coincidentally I found out as I completed the piece, that we were just about to enter (or had just entered) the 2000-year long Age of Aquarius.
I had no previous idea about — nor am I particularly interested in — the astrological ages, but with the timing of it all, I couldn’t help but name the piece ‘Aquarius.’
Note by Dai Fujikura (edited by Alison Phillips).
MARTIN BRESNICK
*** (1997)
In the recent past when a composer wished to suggest a program or narrative for a composition but not reveal the contents of that program in the title, the symbol of three stars might be used instead. Perhaps the most famous example of that practice is found in Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young. In his collection of colorful, often frankly programmatic pieces (Traumerei, the Happy Farmer, Sailor Song, etc.) Schumann gives three works the enigmatic three stars in lieu of conventional titles. Most scholars believe those works were written for Clara. Robert, always fond of the world of the hermetic, reckoned that Clara alone could easily divine their meanings. The world would (or would not) simply have to guess.
Janáček, too, when trying to find an acceptable title for his second string quartet (he first wanted to call it Love Letters) threatened to give his work the three stars title, but finally settled on Intimate Pages. The last three of his compositions for the piano set On An Overgrown Path, however, utilize the three stars — thereby hiding their suggestive programs behind the stars’ orthographic veil.
And so it is with me…
*** was premiered by musicians of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Shifrin, Clarinet, Paul Neubauer, viola, and Jon Klibbonoff, piano, on March 3, 1997 at Merkin Hall.
GEORGE CRUMB
Dream Sequence (Images II) (1976)
This extraordinary, quiet, mysterious piece is perhaps the most extreme of the explorations of composer George Crumb into his characteristic static realm of sound events. As usual he crafts these sounds with lapidary precision and exceptionally subtle distinctions.
The sound world Crumb has created since the 1950s is suggested by a perusal of his list of works. Nocturnes, Night-Music, Zodiac musings, Dreams, Images, Sleep. Apparitions and hauntings, voices from the past, and voices from nature dominate the catalog.
The instrumentation of Dream Sequence is essentially a piano trio plus percussion, though the percussion and piano make one discrete group, and the two strings play as a duo. The percussion is typically exotic: The pianist plays three water-tuned crystal goblets and a Thai wooden buffalo bell. The percussionist has Japanese temple bells, crotales (finger cymbals), sleigh bells, maraca, and suspended cymbals. In addition, there are two more players who remain offstage, continually playing a glass harmonica — four more crystal goblets tuned to the chord C sharp, E, A, D. These notes hang in the air continually throughout Dream Sequence and are marked “quasi subliminal.”
Dream Sequence appears to be an attempt to capture the elusiveness of dream. While nearly all music is linear, with a melodic line moving in a perceptible flow across time, this work (and much of Crumb’s other music) does not. What melodies there are just float, seemingly disconnected from time. The music hangs in one place rather than moving. It does not move in a straight line, but circularly.
This is not just a metaphoric description. Most of Dream Sequence is, literally, written in circles rather than on straight staff lines. Crumb developed this special “circular notation” earlier and used it in parts of such works as his orchestral Echoes of Time and the River and the song cycle Ancient Voices of Children.
None of his works uses circular notation as much as this one. Players begin playing at a point on a system of staves that is drawn in a circular shape, and play around the circle. There is a varying amount of freedom as to how to move and the manner of playing. Except at the very beginning and the end the piano and percussion move around their own circle, while the cello and violin have their own, independent circle.
Note by Brightwork New Music Ensemble.